cauliflower pizza - AMAZE

I spotted the original recipe on The Diet Kitchen and if you're not subscribed to their youtube channel then you need to go do it!  My favourite videos they put up are the "my favourite things" videos where they show off 3 or 4 macro friendly food found in the UK.  Much good things.

Ingredients:

800g of cauliflower (I got two from Tescos and that gave us 934g and that worked just fine)
1 egg
herbs (we used garlic powder, basil, oregano, salt, and pepper)
50g cheese
tomato puree
toppings (we used 2 chicken breasts - protein-tastic)

Step 1
Cut off the rubbish from your cauliflower and cut all the white bits into smaller white bits.  Place in a bowl and take a weird photo of it.

Step 2

Put the cauliflower into a food processor or use a hand blender to turn it into a mushy "cauliflower flour".  I used a hand blender and I honestly thought it would never work, but I kept at it for 5 minutes and had the mush required!

lovely mush!

Step 3

Put the mush bowl into the microwave for 7 minutes and pre-heat your oven to 220 degrees C.  Warning: this will make your whole house smell like horrible cauliflower.  Once it's out of the microwave let it cool or you will burn your hand in the next step like I did. 

Step 4

Take a clean tea towel and lay it out flat.  Pour the mush into the tea towel, wrap the towel up around it to make a wee ball, and over a bowl squeeze out all the excess water.  The more water you squeeze out then the crispier your base will be.

Step 5

Once you've squeezed out the water it's time to add flavour, half the cheese, and the egg. We added salt, pepper, garlic powder, dried basil, and dried oregano.  

Step 6

Base constructing time!  Take an oven tray and place a non-stick baking sheet on the tray.  Spray liberally with low calorie cooking spray or use a teaspoon of oil.  Plop the cauliflower mush onto the tray and spread out using your hands into a pizza shape...ours was more of a rectangle pizza...but don't make it too thick or it'll taste gross.

Step 7

Cook the base for 25 minutes or until golden and crispy enough for you.  The edges will probably go browner than the rest of it but don't panic!

Step 8

Pizza out, toppings on!  We used tomato puree, the rest of the grated lower fat cheese, chicken, pesto, and spinach.  Pop it back in the oven for 5-7 minutes for everything to melt and get amazing.

TA DAH!

I'm not going to lie, this is nothing like a proper like pizza hut pizza, but it is fucking tasty.  For someone watching their macros this is PERFECT.  We endulged a little with cheese and extra chicken but the macros for half a pizza worked out roughly as:

Calories - 497.5

Carbs - 14.5g

Fat - 18.5g

Protein - 62.5g

Or without toppings:

Calories - 272

Carbs - 12g

Fat - 12g

Protein - 23g

Will defo be doing this again!

Review: Pulse V4 sour apple

I really wanted to go back to using pre-workouts and I wanted to try this Sour Apple flavour for ageeeeeees so I went ahead and picked this up from Myprotein.com for a reasonable £19.99.

First thing, the flavour is actually pretty good for a pre-workout.  It's never going to taste as good as something like BSN No Xplode Green Apple which tastes AMAZING.  But for the price i'm really not disappointed at all with the taste.  I think it tastes better if it's super cold, so use ice water or mix it and put it in the fridge for a bit.

Now, the important stuff.  What the hell is in it?

The ingredients list looks like this:

Perform and Pump blend (Creapure [4g], AAKG, Beta Alanine, Citrulline Malate) 9.2g
Focus and Energise Matrix (L Tyrosine, Taurine, Guarana Extract, Caffeine) 3.8g.  A 17g serving of Pulse® contains approximately 168.4mg of caffeine.

What you want to stay away from is proprietary blends in pre-workouts.  This hiding under-dosed ingredients behind the term "proprietary blend" to mislead the consumer.  Luckily, we don't have that here.  You can quite clearly see from the label what you are putting into your body.  

Creapure is a Creatine Monohydrate product that is meant to be more pure than standard Creatine Monohydrate (99.9% pure) and is therefore more expensive.  Whether that product is supperior to standard Creatine Monohydrate, I have my doubts, but still.  A nice bonus.  It probably bumps up the price of the product though!  According to Antonio and Ciccone (2013) Creatine and resistance exercise can increase lean muscle mass and strength.  It is widely recognised as a supplement that anyone who is active should take, and I side with that too.  But the minimum dose should be 5g per day so at 4g you're coming short.  So on top of my pre-workout i'm still gonna have a scoop of creatine at some other point in the day.  

Arginine Alpha-ketoglutarate is also known as AAKG or simply arginine.  This ingredient is said to improve muscular endurance and strength, but the research I have done doesn't seem to like it at all!  Wax et al (2012) found no correlation between acute ingestion of arginine and improvement in muscular endurance and strength, but they did say that that may suggest that a loading phase would be necessary.  I don't think it'll hurt taking in arginine, but I'm dubious on it's effectiveness.  

Beta alanine is the ingredient that can produce the "fizzy face" associated with pre-workouts.  But what does it actually do?  It is basically a stimulant that can help increase performance.  Hobson et al (2013) found that beta alanine increased the speed of performance in rowers.  A similar study was run by Ducker et al (2013) that found that there was a "very likely" chance that runners supplementing with beta alanine would improve their 800m race time.  So if you're doing sprints rowing I imagine this supplement will positively affect your results.  I would also imagine that this will help with power movements in weight lifting, so might help with that big surge of power required when sitting at the bottom of a squat.

Citrulline Malate is notorious for being a fighter of fatigue, especially for endurance athletes.  Lopez et al (2012) carried out a study on the effects of citrulline malate on fatigue for high performance athletes and found that the supplement allows for a better recovery of blood lactate and of fatigue therefore promoting recovery and improving the chance of further high intensity exercise.  

The remaining ingredients (L Tyrosine, Taurine, and caffeine) are all there to help with alertness and as stimulants.  

I actually feel they are underdosing all these ingredients a little.  After the 4g of creapure are taken off the 9g in the "Perform and Pump blend" you are left with 5 g of AAKG, Beta Alanine, Citrulline Malate and I really would prefer to have 3g of each ingredient in my pre-workout.  When I first tried the pre-workout about 2 years ago I felt the effects massively, but since then my body has got used to the ingredients so when I tried this supplement I didn't feel a massive stimulant effect like I would expect.  I think if I upped the dose, or reduced the caffeine in my diet, I would see great results using this product, especially for the price.

Price 8/10
Taste 7/10
Performance 6/10

References

Antonio, J and Ciccone, V. (2013) ‘The effects of pre versus post workout supplementation of creatine monohydrate on body composition and strength’ Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 10:36.

 

Ducker, KJ., Dawson, B., Wallman, KE. (2013) ‘Effect of Beta-Alanine Supplementation 

on 800-m Running Performance’ International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, Vol. 23 pp554 -561.

Hobson, RM., Harris, RC., Martin D., Smith, P., Macklin, B., Gualano, B., Sale, C. (2013) ‘Effect of Beta-Alanine With and Without Sodium Bicarbonate on 2,000-m Rowing Performance’ International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism, Vol. 23 Issue 5, pp480-488.

Wax, B., Kavazis, AN., Webb, HE,, Brown, SP. (2012) ‘Acute L-arginine alpha ketoglutarate supplementation fails to improve muscular performance in resistance trained and untrained men’ Journal Of The International Society Of Sports Nutrition, Vol. 9, pp6.

moving forward

I have realised through the years that I am my best person when I am working for something, fighting for something,or moving forward in any way. I cannot be satisfied with coasting, it doesn't sit with me. And when I am at the bottom I have more drive and ambition than any other time.

Recently I've felt like I was coasting and subsequently failing at things. Coasting at Derby and the gym and subsequently failing at both. It's actually been a really rough week. But as a result I've kicked everything up a gear and I feel like I'm fighting and working for this again, and that's when I feel most alive.

For derby I continued to put effort into practice but something was missing but I didn't know what it was. It was only when the privledge of being on a team was taken off me did I see how much extra effort I could put into practice. Now I will fight for the entire 120 minutes to prove without a doubt that I should be on a team. Yes it was shit and I was heartbroken, but it was the best thing for me.

In the gym my bench press has just not been progressing. It's the only lift I am genuinely struggling with and for the first time I was failing to hit my numbers. I should never fail to hit my numbers. First problem - I was training at a gym with substandard equipment and surrounded by people who don't have the same goals and don't push me to be better. Solution? I changed gyms and it's AMAZING. In the new gym I'm surrounded by people a lot stronger than me and it's pushing me. They also have more than one barbell so yeah. Because I'm now in a suitable environment I'm thinking all day about getting to the gym, I'm thinking about my lifts, the numbers I'm gonna do, picturing myself completing the lifts, and itching to get in there. This itself has made me feel like I'm not just working out anymore, I'm training. Everything I do up until that moment in the gym is prep for the lift. It's all training and I am focused and ready to progress!

Since making these changes (also adding in an extra bench press day and really nailing leg drive) I've already beat my current pb and I imagine in future I'll be doing a lot more of that.

I guess what I want to get across is that sometimes things are shit and you feel like you can do nothing right, but dig deep,  push through, and fight to move forward. Maybe one day I'll not be able to pick myself up and dust myself off but today is not that day. I think I'll keep saying that forever. Today is not that day.